sovay | There's a land to burn out everything that you've learned

Internet! I am looking for a good database and/or personal recommendations of science fiction media foregrounding characters of color. My father was expressing his disappointment in the latest season of Doctor Who tonight and he is quite right (among other complaints) that reverse-fridging a male character reads much less cleverly and much more sketchily when the male character is black. I should like to be able to recommend him some antidotes.¹ More than one person of color in the cast preferred—who are not the canaries in the coal mine or the sacrifices on behalf of the white characters, if there are any white characters; there don't need to be. Bonus points from my perspective if there are women with agency and queer characters. (I should just hand him Janelle Monáe's back catalogue, right?) He is a hard sell on animation and does not play games, but enjoys things that are not in English. I can do this a lot more easily with books.

1. It is not like my father has never seen science fiction with protagonists of color; he followed Eureka for a while just because it contained Joe Morton. I just know there's always room for more. A lot of room.

Threaded | Flat

My enjoyment of Deep Space Nine has a lot to do with the fact that the main cast is composed of a black man and his son, a Sudanese man, four or five humanoid aliens and one white guy who is often not foregrounded. Admittedly most of the aliens are played by white people, and only two of them are women (though the women are GREAT), but the fact that the most prominent human faces that you see on the show are brown is still pretty refreshing -- especially since one of them is the guy in charge.

I've heard good things from many quarters about Attack the Block, but haven't seen it myself. (I, too, can do this a lot more easily with books.)

Science fiction and not fantasy? Otherwise, Sleepy Hollow is excellent in that regard. That's one I've actually watched.

Deep Space Nine? And the other Star Trek series to a lesser extent. Though I'm afraid they're a no-go as far as queer characters are concerned.

I love love love Elementary, but it's not remotely science-fiction --it's crime procedural based on Sherlock Holmes, with Lucy Liu playing an asian-american Joan Watson. There're some regular black men who appear in supporting (mostly not coal mine roles --in the second season, there's an arc where one of the black cops gets shot instead of Holmes, but he survives, and his and Holmes further interactions tend to be really interesting around roles of cops vs roles of consulting detectives).

Soyeah.

I should just hand him Janelle Monáe's back catalogue, right

Yes

Seconding above recs for Sleepy Hollow (silly and ridiculous but good, as long as you are willing to ignore the blatantly misogynist writing of Katrina Crane), DS9, and Elementary (OMG how perfect is Joan Watson? The perfectest, that's how). If your dad watched Eureka, he's probably already aware of Warehouse 13 (also campy and ridiculous at times) which featured a black woman in the main ensemble for the first three(?) seasons, and a black woman in the supporting cast for the entire run. The supporting character, Mrs Fredericks, didn't show up in every episode, but she was the Person in Charge of Everything. I felt like sometimes her role verged into Magical Negro territory, but she wasn't the only character who had mystical whatsits going on. I'm not sure if Person of Interest counts as scifi or dystopian thriller, but the black woman cop in the first three seasons was excellent. She got written out and replaced with a light/passing Iranian/Spanish actress, sadly.

There's also the whole universe of J-dramas, K-dramas, Bollywood, Lollywood, etc. I'm not as familiar with what scifi is available there, but I feel like I have to shout out Enthiran for the single most ridiculous mecha scene in film history.

If very near-future is of interest, then ReGenesis. Racially diverse cast, queer and neuroatypical characters. Really cool series, I thought the last season was weaker than the others, but still a good watch. Also, the science is surprisingly solid.

Attack the Block.

As I've said before, Defiance does do the "aliens are people 'of colour' but mainly played by white people" thing people complain about, and rightly. That said, the guy playing Alak Tarr is actually East Asian, his human wife is Hispanic, her father is First Nations (he's Graham fuckin' Greene, man), there's a really great black character, and many, many women with incredible amounts of agency. Actually, it's one of the only SF shows I can think of currently that has genuine gender parity in terms of its cast.

If he hasn't seen Sunshine, I'd also recommend that, in terms of representation. That's a genuinely international-looking crew on that internationally-driven space mission. Oh, and weirdly, Z Nation is doing well on the POC front, especially now that Roberta Warren is the main heroic leader type. Even 10K, the guy who wants to shoot ten thousand zombies, doesn't look purely white to me, and the two girls he's crushed on thus far have been maybe-Filipino and definitely-Asian.

I'm going to guess that perhaps you have recced him Pacific Rim already.

For two years of your life Burn Gorman was on _Torchwood_, a show with which I have a complicated relationship.

Here's an obscure example: _Charlie Jade_, a cancelled-after-one-season show from 2005. It is set in Cape Town (and two alternate-universe Cape Towns) (and was filmed there). While the two headline characters are white, a lot of the cast is South African and black; I think more are South African and white. The faces are distinctly not all Hollywood-TV-pretty.

It's a weird show. Multiple-universe noir. Lovely, lovely lighting. I'm not sure the season plot makes any sense; gotta rewatch someday.

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